Bond’s race with Xenia Onatopp (Famke Janssen), supposedly in the hills above ‘Monte Carlo’, uses the mountain roads around Thorenc, about 20 miles north of Grasse, way to the northwest. Nevertheless, Bond arrives at the Casino de Monte Carlo, Monaco, and it’s from the bay at Monte Carlo that Onatopp steals the Stealth helicopter. You can see the principality again as the site of the Grand Prix race in Iron Man 2.

M’s office is, finally, MI6’s real HQ, Vauxhall Cross, the spanking new building at 85 Albert Embankment on the Thames by Vauxhall Bridge. It turns up again, at the start of the river chase in The World Is Not Enough, and gets blown upin Skyfall. Pierce Brosnan turns up at the HQ as a somewhat shabbier, seedier agent in John
Boorman’s film of John Le Carre’s The Tailor of Panama.

GoldenEye location: Bond in Russia: Palace Square, St Petersburg

Although there is some real filming in St Petersburg in Russia, much of the tank chase was filmed on a massive set, built at the old Rolls Royce aircraft plant in Leavesden, Hertfordshire, which has since, of course, been developed to become the vast Leavesden Studio, home of the Harry Potter films and the Warner Bros Studio Tour.

Many of the other ‘Russian’ locations were filmed around the southeast of England: ‘St Petersburg Airport’, where Bond is met by Jack Wade (Joe Don Baker), is actually the Queen’s Stand, Epsom Racecourse, Epsom, Surrey.

The 'St Petersburg' square, where Wade uses a sledgehammer to fix his rusty blue Moskovich, is the courtyard of the recently restored Somerset House on the Strand – which later became the ‘Ministry of Defence’ in Tomorrow Never Dies. This popular filming location can also be seen in Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow (as turn-of-the-century ‘Manhattan’), as the exterior of ‘Devonshire House’ in historical biopic The Duchess, with Keira Knightley; Billy Wilder’s superb The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (as the ‘Diogenes Club’ where Holmes meets his older brother Mycroft (Christopher Lee); as ‘Buckingham Palce’ in King Ralph; in Shanghai Knights (where Jackie Chan invents the kung fu movie at the end of the film); and even as ‘Beverly Hills’ in Bride And Prejudice.

The exterior is the rear (Fulham Road side) of the 1839 chapel in Brompton Cemetery, Old Brompton Road, Earl’s Court, SW5. You might recognise this as the cemetery where Rowan Atkinson disrupts the funeral in Bond spoof Johnny English.

This extravagantly Victorian graveyard also features in arty horror pic Afraid Of The Dark, Iain Softley’s Henry James adaptation The Wings of the Dove and bittersweet romantic comedy Jack and Sarah, with Richard E Grant.

The ‘St Petersburg’ council chamber, where General Ourumov learns that Natalya has survived the GoldenEye detonation, uses the grandiose architecture of the Livery Hall of the Drapers’ Company, Throgmorton Street, EC2 in the City of London (which also became ‘Russia’ for the Val Kilmer version of The Saint).

The railway scenes were filmed on the Nene Valley Railway, Peterborough.